


Cold and Dark

by valamerys



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: F/M, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-07 22:57:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8819440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valamerys/pseuds/valamerys
Summary: Modern! Vampire! AU where the courts are clans, Elain wanders alone after dark, and Lucien is one of the things that go bump in the night.





	

**Author's Note:**

> when vampires return to the good graces of YA, i for sure have at least one melodramatic vampire romance novel in me. this is Too Fun

Elain is seventeen. It is years before Feyre gets it into her mind to kill a vampire for the reward money, long before the leader of the monster’s clan knocks on their door and takes her away for it.

Elain is seventeen, and for all the panic about them, she’s never seen a vampire in person.

She’s seen them on the news, of course, being hauled away in handcuffs and muzzles, or at podiums explaining their bloodlust to a jury. _Things like them shouldn’t even get trials_ , Nesta had hissed before turning it off. They all wear silver bracelets, now, and there’s a huge market for garlic spray, although every half intelligent person knows the garlic thing is a myth perpetuated by Facebook clickbait articles. Elain hasn’t been to church in ten years, but Nesta got her a cross necklace for her birthday. It’s hard to blame the people who want to believe the illusion of protection when the newspaper is constantly covered in pictures of bloodless corpses and headlines like “VAMPIRE GANGS CAUSE DEATH OF FIFTEEN IN TERRITORY STANDOFF.” Last year in school, half their health class was dedicated to vampires: their anatomy, their feeding habits, avoiding them.

Elain got an A in the class. So she really should know better than to do something so incredibly stupid as walk home alone in the dark from her part-time job at the florist’s, but she missed the bus and her phone is dead, so she can’t ask Nesta to pick her up. It’s quiet out, the streets slick with rain from a few hours ago, and Elain walks just a little faster, clutching the straps of her backpack, as an owl hoots in the distance. _It’s not far_ , she tells herself, trying to calm her heart rate. News reports from the last few years of girls like her found with twin holes in their necks flash rapid-fire through through her mind _. It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine…_

Elain is seventeen, and she really shouldn’t be surprised, as she passes the alley, to see one dark shape within it turn into two as it becomes obvious that one is a figure slumped against the wall, and the other raises its head to look at her with glinting eyes and a bloody mouth.

She should run, but every muscle in her body locks, rapt with terror, as the figure rises, slowly. _Eyes_ was wrong, she realizes. He only has one, and even from a distance she can tell it’s bright red—the sign of a vampire having freshly fed. He takes a step towards her and Elain suddenly regains control, stumbles backwards and turns to run—

And runs right into him.

“Going somewhere, dove?”

Elain has never seen a vampire before and now she’s eight inches away from one. He uses his thumb to brush a stray trickle of blood from his lip into his mouth, eye fixed on her, and Elain thinks she sees a glint of fang. Her heart hammers in her throat, pure terror making her head swim.

“N-no.”

“Mm.” He makes a noncommittal noise and takes a casual step towards her, and another, and Elain doesn’t even realize she’s backing up until the alley wall hits her back, cold seeping through her sweater. He braces a hand on the wall next to her head and leans in on it, Elain’s every sense at a fever pitch of fear screaming at her to get away, get away, he’s too close—

“And what’s a tasty little thing like you doing out this late, all alone?”

“I-I’m trying to get home. From work.”

In the half-illumination from the weak streetlight down the block she can see he has red hair, long and half bound back, a shock against his grey-pale skin. The color of death. He’d be beautiful otherwise, even with the black patch that covers the one eye, all lithe limbs and masculine angularity. That’s part of their power, of course, everyone knows that. They’re all gorgeous, so you get close enough for them to kill.

He draws in, slowly, and Elain can’t breathe with fear as his icy breath brushes her neck.

“And did no one ever tell you,” his voice is a low rumble, “that if you wander after dark, some horrible beast might come along and sink his teeth into you?”

Elain holds back a sob, although he must be able to feel her trembling. His mouth is inches from her neck, surely he’s about to—

“I’m waiting for an answer, dove.”

“They did,” Elain gasps, “I know it was stupid, I know—“ She breaks off as he opens his mouth and she flinches, braces for the impact of her teeth in his neck, but he doesn’t bite her, just lingers, breathes as though he’s inhaling her scent. She can feel the cold radiating from his skin, the sensation of _death_ coming off him making her skin crawl.

“Are you going to be more careful in the future?” He asks; it’s almost a growl, and tears collect at the corners of her eyes.

“Yes,” she whispers.

Elain feels a tiny spot of pressure, and realizes that his head is at an angle—not to bite her, but just to press one fang against the skin of her neck, drag it slowly upwards in a way that’s both threatening and teasing—he could make the slightest adjustment and pierce her skin with it, but he doesn’t. Elain lets out a whimper as he relents to say, “And no one like me is going to ever find you alone and unprotected in a dark alley again?”

“N-No.”

He draws back slightly to look her in the eyes. “You promise?”

Elain notices, now, the thick, jagged scar that trails under the eyepatch down almost to his jaw. As powerful as he is, what could have done that? Or did he get it when he was human?

How long ago was that?

She nods rapidly, unable to find her voice.

He gives her a razor-thin smile. “Have a pleasant evening, then.” He shoves himself off the wall, away from her.

Elain stays still with shock, with dawning realization that all he wanted was to… scare her. Into being more careful?

Her hand goes to her neck, still tingling with the sensation of his teeth. “You’re—you’re not going to—?”

“Why would I?” He asks, as though it’s a silly question. He inclines his head towards the body in the alley. “I’ve already eaten. And besides, we wouldn’t want to risk getting blood on that nice sweater of yours.”

Elain’s cheeks flame. Her sweater’s pink, and it has a cat on it. It’s from Goodwill.

He ambles backwards towards the street. “You’ll want to be out of here before the ambulance comes, unless you’d like to spend your night describing me to the police.”

“Ambulance—?”

She looks at the body she assumed was dead, but sure enough, it shifts, lets out a faint moan.

“He’ll be fine. I call before I bite and I don’t take enough to kill,” the vampire says arily.

Elain turns to him in surprise, her breathing slowly returning to normal as she accepts that she isn’t about to die. “You suck people’s blood but arrange their rides to the hospital?” _You run your teeth up my neck but don’t bite me?_

“It’s not a perfect system, but a man has to eat.”

Elain wants to say y _ou’re not a man, you’re a monster,_ but something stays her. It has never occurred to her that vampires might do anything other than leave behind fully-drained, brutalized corpses.

But still, the man behind them moans, and she feels a pang of fury for him. She pushes away from the wall, takes a shaky step forward. “I _should_ report you to the cops. You’re still hurting people.”

“You’d be wasting your time,” he says, a cold edge to his words. “They won’t find me.”

The certainty he says it with makes a chill run through Elain—he’s no rogue vampire, then. He must be in one of the clans, to be so sure law enforcement poses no threat to him.

He’s walking backwards again, casually, slowly disappearing into the pool of darkness cast by a building’s shadow. “Whatever you decide, dove, do it quick.”

Elain hears it then, the faint but growing wail of the ambulance’s siren in the distance.

“And for your sake—“ Elain jumps about a foot; suddenly he’s by her side, speaking into her ear— “I hope I never see you again.”

And then he’s gone, vanished entirely.

Elain all but sprints the rest of the way home, and when the door closes behind her she slides to the ground with her back against it, shaking furiously until Nesta finds her. Nesta gives her a thorough, half-panicked scolding for being out so late— _what if you’d run into a vampire, Elain? What then?_ —but Elain barely hears it, still feeling the phantom sensation of him against her and the ring of his voice in her ears.

She does not tell Nesta about the encounter. She does not tell anyone.

But she keeps her promise, and doesn’t go out alone after sunset ever again.

—————————

Feyre comes back the first time, and it’s a shock.

They’d thought surely she’d been drained for dead, or chained up and kept as a slave for her blood, or, worst of all, made into one of them—but the story she tells them is much different, of vampires who suffer the wrath and monstrous rule of one of their own, who long for freedom and peace as much as the living do.

  
 _They’re not mindless killers,_ Feyre says defensively. _We’re wrong about them._ Nesta argues with her, but Elain just stares at her hands, hoping her face doesn’t betray that she knows it, firsthand. She wonders furtively if Feyre has met _her_ vampire—for lack of a name, that is the way she has grown to think of him—but surely not; in a city teeming with vampires it would be silly to ask, and invite questions Elain doesn’t want to answer.

When Feyre leaves again for love of one of them, Nesta spends all afternoon staring out the window after her.

 _We’ll never see her again, you know,_ she says to Elain.

—————————-

Feyre comes back the second time, and it’s an entirely different kind of shock.

There is something terrible beyond words in seeing a face Elain loves twisted into a dead facsimile. Too pale, too sharp, with empty eyes, a dark wine-red, not hungry yet but not freshly fed, either. Her teeth glint as she implores them, begs them, to help her—Elain doesn’t want to be afraid, not of Feyre, but she can do little but stand behind Nesta and try not to cry for her little sister.

The vampires she eventually brings into their house are no less terrifying, and Elain is half-grateful she has experience standing close to one, even if that encounter was years ago now; she’s prepared for the way their cold, dead bodies leech the heat from the air, for the way everything about their too-precise movements, their skin, their sharp teeth, screams _unnatural, dead, wrong—_

To be fair, the senators they eventually summon are _wrong_ in their own right, as Elain stands in her worn sneakers, a heart-shaped clip in her hair, between the black leather jackets on the vampires and the tailored suits of the politicians. (Elain has done a lot of strange things, but email her state representative on behalf of a vampire gang is fairly high on the list).

 _The King intends to spark all-out war,_ the one called Rhysand explains, his cool facade cracking only a little. _The clan violence is only the beginning. If you push the legislation through, it’s not too late to—_

 _We do not make deals with vampires,_ says one, imperious ice. _And if we did, it would not be with the Nocte._

The clan Rhysand leads. The clan Feyre is now a part of. The clan that she and Nesta have apparently allied themselves with, for better or worse.

It turns out to be for worse.


End file.
